We were in a critical writing class at Bennington College, circa 2003, and a student was reading a paper that celebrated the then resurgence of “adult animated” sitcoms. While The Simpsons had been on for years by that point, there was a new crop of comedies like Family Guy that had gotten some recognition for the same sort of mile-a-minute skewering of pop culture—made by and for people with the attention spans of gnats. His paper was well-written, with many examples of the form, but he completely omitted one show that partly filled the gap between the (fairly) highbrow Simpsons and (very) low-brow Family Guy, a show that meant a great deal to me growing up.
“You forgot The Critic,” I said.
I could tell immediately most of the people in the room didn’t know what I was talking about. But the people who did know had kind of a gleam in their eyes.
The Critic remains, nearly thirty years after its premiere, criminally overlooked as an example of some of the more adventurous animation being done on US TV in the ‘90s. The brainchild of Al Jean and Mike Reiss, two showrunners from The Simpsons, it ran two seasons—one on ABC, the other on FOX—before being relegated to reruns on Comedy Central (and a piddling web-series). But the cult of Critic fans is a dedicated one. We fought for the DVD set and we won and the company that made it never thought it would sell. They’ve since had to reprint it.
The show focused on a cable film critic, Jay Sherman—the adopted child of WASP parents in New York—who hates every film he sees, is unpleasant to just about everyone, and yet ends up being lovable in his misery. The part was written for Jon Lovitz, who (aside from the backstory) seems very much the same sort of character.
“Well, that makes sense you find that an influence,” you say. “You watched a show about a film critic and now you fancy yourself one.” Well, yes and no—Jay Sherman may very well have spurned my desire to be a film critic, but I think I responded more to everything else about Jay. We ended up sharing, for better or worse, similar tendencies and characteristics: rocky relationships, a bottomless pit where a stomach should be—but, most importantly—he merely brought to the surface a neurosis I shouldn’t have been born with.
While I’m from the sunny Southland, I have always felt more in line with gloomy neurotics who roam around New York arguing with streetlamps. Jay’s inability to move forward with his life, his insecurities, his foibles—all these things showed up in my early work more times than I can tell.
So much so that when I asked my director from Bennington, Penn Genthner, to write a forward to my first collection of plays, he wrote this:
“The following plays are stories of people inadequately prepared for the world. Each offers its protagonists the opportunity to take a leadership role in their lives. Some succeed, others fail, some fail to try.” I wasn’t sure if he was writing about me in 2008 or my plays, to be frank.
At any rate, a lot of that neurosis in the plays has gone—though it never goes away as it is drama after all—but one thing that has not gone away is my sense of humor and the rhythm with which I deliver a joke. My love of irony, satire, parody, and sarcasm (my precious little babies) probably developed from wearing out VHS tapes of Critic episodes. In addition, I could tell that The Critic was smarter than the average bear, and I admired the way it constructed jokes. One quick example:
In the second season, Jay got a love interest—a hard-working Southern lady named Alice Thompkins (voiced by Park Overall). She describes to Jay her failed marriage to a country-music singer.
[ALICE: I was waitin' tables in Knoxville while Cyrus tried to make it as a country singer. But then, I began to suspect he was cheatin' on me.
JAY: How?
ALICE: It was in his songs: “My Lyin’ Heart,” “Daddy’s Steppin’ Out,” and then his album I’m Being Unfaithful to My Wife Alice Thompkins. You Heard Me, Alice Thompkins.]
That does end with a shot of the LP with this ridiculous title. The beauty of that little line teaches you a lot about the way Critic writers constructed jokes. Of course, there’s the rule of three (something psychological and universal there) plus the way the length of the album title subverts your expectation while enhancing the already-funny parodies of actual Country songs, like “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” In the end, the joke is smart, dumb, funny, and fun to listen to. It’s great comedy writing.
So, if it was so great, then...?
One of the reasons The Critic never caught on like The Simpsons is because it is set on the East Coast, generally about bright people, and parody, satire, and sarcasm in 1994 were yet to be the crux of everything we do as a society. Basically, The Critic was the smartest kid in class you wanted to kick rather than buy a milk.
The clearest influence from the show on my life is that it introduced me to non-sequiturs, easily my favorite aspect of the English language. I have found myself quoting the lines of Jay’s father, Franklin Sherman, my entire life. I know them all, none of them make sense, and I find when there’s a verbal sparring match with someone, plopping a nice non-sequitur right there on the table tends to diffuse any tension as you can both laugh at something stupid.
In the pilot of The Critic, Jay explains to his date that his father has had a stroke. Franklin’s wife Eleanor (get it? Upstate New York? Franklin and Eleanor?) chimes in, “He didn’t really. That’s just how we explain his personality.” Here’s two lines from Franklin that further explain:
In one episode, we see that a statue of Franklin has been vandalized by a student placing a banana in the ear. Franklin’s response is, “There’s a reason there’s a banana in my ear. I’m trying to lure the monkey out of my head.”
At another dinner table conversation, prison is mentioned and Franklin chimes in, “Ah, prison! That was the best five to ten years of my life. You know, I was a model prisoner. Modeled lingerie, mostly.”
Like last week’s blog on James Gregory, the audible absence weighs heavily against me. Franklin was voiced by Gerrit Graham, a very funny actor who models Franklin’s voice on the transatlantic drawl you used to hear in certain East coast millionaires. His physical appearance is almost certainly drawn from George H. W. Bush, but the Buckley-like drawl is what makes most of these jokes funny.
But here’s one where you don’t need the voice. In one episode, Franklin attends the Pulitzer Prize ceremony (huh?) and quips, “This is the worst production of Porgy and Bess I’ve ever seen!” The line is funny to begin with, evoking a dated Gershwin opera, but for me it’s no longer even a non-sequitur. I tend to say this about five times a year after going to attend a concert, play, or film. I am inevitably always right because I have never seen Porgy and Bess. Therefore, everything I saw last year, would have been the worst production of Porgy and Bess I’ve ever seen by doing nothing more than not being a production of Porgy and Bess at all. Do you follow? No? Good!
Another rule-of-three joke comes in an episode where Franklin decides to run as vice-president on an Independent ticket (these were the years of Ross Perot & such things might have mattered). Worried his father is stark-raving mad, Jay tries to see if Franklin understands what he’s up to. Franklin retorts, “Son, could I do a worse job than Spiro Agnew, or Aaron Burr, or William Rufus DeVane King? He died in Cuba two weeks after being sworn in!” Jay, feeling bad, says, “Well, I guess you do know what you’re doing.” Then, Franklin puts a pair of stockings over his head and says, “Yeah. Now let’s rob that bank!”
I never watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus as a child, but I think Franklin was my Flying Circus. His humor seems to all come from the same wellspring that allowed Graham Chapman to insert nonsense phrases throughout Python episodes (like “Lemon Curry!”) to simply throw things off a bit—something arcane, something ridiculous, something sublime. What makes it work is the references are off kilter, the language is like refuse from an overused brain, and the situations patently absurd. It’s not stupid. It’s beyond stupid. It’s genius.
Of course, the reason people remember the show are the movie parodies. The Critic was not originally intended to be animated, but if they had shot the parodies (like Honey, I Ate the Kid—a Silence of the Lambs parody) the show would have been cost prohibitive. Animation allowed them to parody movies which were then in cinemas.
As was pointed out on the DVD commentaries, most of those jokes still land today because the movies they parodied are movies that we still watch. Heck, we're watching them all over again because their reboots are all that they show in the cineplexes, so a parody of Jurassic Park is as relevant today as it would have been in the mid ‘90s.
Their Jurassic Park parody was one of the best. Called "Jurassic Park II" (as The Lost World: Jurassic Park had yet to come out), it consisted of some of the characters locking a velociraptor in a room only to discover the dinosaur finds its way in with a key. Hammond screams, "You may have us, but you'll never got off the island!" The velociraptor then takes out a pipe and monologues in a British accent, "I beg to differ for, you see, the other 'raptors and I have built a crude suspension bridge to Venezuela. Once there, I shall lay low and assume odd jobs under the name Mr. Pilkington. But, perhaps I've said too much." The funniest thing about the line is the name Pilkington. It's a perfect name, but I have no idea why.
Yet, The Critic ultimately failed to win more than a cult audience. I believe its second season was a touch superior and had a lot more heart. Certainly, if the show had come out today, it might’ve lasted longer on a streaming service or something. As it is, it's one of the many shows of the ‘90s that succeeded creatively and failed commercially. I think we forget how original and interesting some of the work was that decade. In animation, you had Klasky-Csupo (Rugrats) and John Kricfalusi (The Ren & Stimpy Show) on Nickelodeon. On primetime television, you had people taking risks like never before (Twin Peaks, Profit). It was an interesting decade, but “interesting” didn’t mean long runs back then.
Watching it today, although I know every episode by heart, it runs at a much slower pace than Family Guy or any of those shows. The animation has costs cut at every corner. It’s clear that the movie parodies definitely work and so that makes the stories about Jay’s life (which rarely intersect with his job) a little less interesting in comparison. But there is funny stuff there. An otherwise milquetoast character, his sister Margot, has a particularly great scene where she’s forced to pick out a dress for a debutante ball.
The tailor tells her he has a strict moral code, and he has to know if she deserves to wear a dress of “virginal white” or off-white (“What we like to call a hussy-white.”) Margot sheepishly looks at the floor, touches her neck and tells him it can be white. “Except for the gloves.”
The writers of The Critic were really, really, funny.
And there are people (who may be wrong) who think I’m funny. If you think I’m funny, this is where it came from. Jay’s catchphrase was “It stinks!” He said that about most any movie (he was a bad critic), but The Critic certainly didn’t stink.
And, if you've never met him—here's Franklin!
Comments